Changing the Subject: An Analysis of Candidates’ Issue Emphasis in Televised Election Debates, 1985-2019

ABSTRACTElection debates are key campaign events that allow citizens to compare politicians’ issue positions side-by-side. While debate moderators try to keep candidates on-topic to contrast issue positions, candidates can try to shift the debate to off-topic issues instead. Election debates thus provide a unique setting to study candidates’ issue emphasis. In this context, we study: who veers off-topic, on which issues, and when? Our theory-driven quantitative content analysis of 24 Belgian election debates (1985–2019) shows that different candidates are equally likely to veer off-topic, but when they do, they emphasize their party’s core issues and follow previous off-topic speaking turns. Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).Supplemental dataSupplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2023.2272856Notes1 Market shares fluctuated around 30% for Één and around 18–20% for VTM (2011–2021, link).2 Author survey data (n = 1117) showed that 50.1% of the 18+ Flemish population watched at least one election debate for the 2018 local elections and/or 2019 general elections.3 The percentages are low because the dictionary approach only considers words that can be linked exclusively to that issue as a “match” (i.e. words that are linked to multiple issues, or no specific issue – such as “the,” “any,” etc.—are not counted as belonging to an issue). As a robustness check, we also conduct the analyses with a binary operationalization of our dependent variable, indicating whether the candidate’s turn contained at least one word from each issue domain (1) or not (0). Except for the “preceding turn off-topic issues” predictor, results remain similar (see Appendix F and G).Additional informationFundingThis work was supported by the KU Leuven Internal Funders under Grant C14/17/022; and FWO and F.R.S.-FNRS Excellence of Science (EOS) under Grant G0F0218N.Notes on contributorsJonas LefevereJonas Lefevere (Ph.D. University of Antwerp) is research manager at the Media, Movements & Politics (M²P) research group at the University of Antwerp, and assistant professor at the Brussels School of Governance (Vrije Universiteit Brussel). His research interests include political communication during the campaign and electoral behavior.Ine GoovaertsIne Goovaerts (Ph.D. KU Leuven) is a post-doctoral researcher in the Media, Movements & Politics (M²P) research group at the University of Antwerp. Her research interests include political communication and political polarization, in particular politicians’ rhetoric in the media, as well as the causes and consequences of polarization.Emma TurkenburgEmma Turkenburg (Ph.D. KU Leuven)is a researcher at the Strategic Communication Group of Wageningen University & Research. Her research interests include both the content and effects of political communication in the media. Key concepts of her work include reasoning, legitimacy, and polarization.